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The Watering Hole, Saturday, April 26, 2014: The Binary Bundy

It started with a story about grazing fees and ended up being a story about racism, as often happens with stories in America these days. Nevada cattle rancher TedCloven Cliven Bundy became the darling of right-wing media when federal agents seized his cattle for Bundy’s refusal to pay more than a million dollars in grazing fees and penalties. Supporters claimed it was an overreach of federal authority, despite the fact that courts have upheld the government’s actions at every step. Things were gearing up to finally have a national discussion on the role of government in our lives (a key and overlooked component in the disagreement between Liberals and Conservatives), when Bundy opened his mouth and talked about something other than property rights.

After initially denying he ever mentioned picking cotton, Bundy made things worse for himself by trying to invoke the names of Rosa Parks and the Rev Martin Luther King, Jr., in defending his use of the term “Negroes.”

via CNN

The clip above ends with Bundy claiming he’s not prejudiced, after screwing up completely what Prejudice is by saying “we’re talking about not being able to exercise what we think and our feelings.” No, Mr. Bundy, when we talk about prejudice we’re talking about exactly that – pre-judging – and all of us, myself included, are guilty of it to one degree or another. All of us look at other people and based often on nothing more than what we see, we make value judgments about them. And the primary thing we want to determine first and foremost is, “Is this person a threat to me?” That’s natural survival instinct and there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s what goes on in the mind after the determination that it’s safe to walk past that person that gets people in trouble. Prejudice isn’t about exercising what we think or feel, it’s about what we think or feel, and how we came to have those thoughts or feelings. When you see a family of black people sitting on their front porch, as a family, and immediately assume that they’re on government subsidy, you are being prejudiced. And not in a good way. Because you have no rational basis for believing what you’re thinking. I assume that when you talk about “exercising” those thoughts or feelings, it means acting on them in some way. Since your thoughts or feelings were not derived from some rational line of thought, but derived instead from your erroneous prejudices, I can’t allow you to act on them without consequence. That’s not denying you your freedom, that’s protecting innocent people from your ignorance. And his prejudice didn’t end there. He went on to say, “They abort their young children, they put their young men in jail, because they never learned how to pick cotton.” Really, Bundy? Is that how you view black people? They’re either in jail or picking cotton?

What concerns me is the tendency for conservative-minded people like Bundy to engage in either/or binary-type thinking. If you’re a young black man, you’re either in jail or in a cotton field. Nothing else. No other options available. Either you’re a totally free individual or you’re dependent on the government for help. I love that one because most of our American way of life is only possible because of government activities, not least of which is police, fire, and military services keeping us safe and free to pursue our individual happiness. So I don’t understand this obsession with Freedom being a complete and total severance of any government authority over you. You might think that’s what the “free” part of a Free Society is, but it isn’t what the “society” part is about. Your Constitutional right to freedom is not absolute. It is limited to what Society says it is. And Government is the vehicle Society uses to ensure it remains Free. So we are all, to one extent or another, dependent on government. To pretend otherwise is to live in a dream world.

Clive Davis Cliven Bundy lives in a dream world. He thinks you’re either totally right or totally wrong, with no middle ground to be even partly right. He thinks he’s right so the government is totally wrong. Never mind that the arbiters of who’s right and who’s wrong have decided that the Government is totally right and Bundy is totally wrong. He’s just decided that the federal government is illegitimate and has no authority over him or his property. In this sense, he must be referring to the cattle as property because the land in this discussion is federal property, which he feels he has every right to use free of charge. Its owners (you and me) disagree. Who do you think is right?

This is our daily open thread. Feel free to discuss Ted NugentTed Bundy Cliven Bundy or anything else you want.

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About Wayne A. Schneider

I'm a Liberal, Libertarian, Atheist Humanist. I believe that though the world is a dangerous place, it can be made better if we stop dividing ourselves by how we're different from each other, and reach out to each other through what we have in common. And that is that we are all human beings on this planet. Please remember that.

“Understand that by voting to have a union, you would be transferring your trust from those you know — me, your coaches and the administrators here (who have our own best interests in mind)— to what you don’t know — a third party who may or may not have the team’s best interest in mind (but who have your best interests in mind),” Fitzgerald wrote.

That old tired ‘we good, union bad’.
Stay with us and we’ll make sure any issues you have will NOT be tended to in a timely manner (especially if it’s a ‘winning’ season). Go Union and you’ll have someone on your side to get issues resolved, generally, more quickly, or at least addressed.

The Bundy situation has made me wonder why the government hasn’t attached other assets, or frozen/seized bank accounts. A caller to Ed Schultz said that Bundy doesn’t own his property, that it is either in his family members’ names, or locked up in trusts.

Will she be on a panel or solo? My guess is that she will be on alone so that they don’t have to give her a chance to tell some rightwhiner; “that’s simply not true and here are the facts that prove it”. That wouldn’t do. Wouldn’t do at all.

I just need to rant. I still get unsolicited emails from people that I deal with and this subject of Bundy has been the latest. More bullshit about Harry Reid. I have actually replied adding legitimate websites that prove these “facts” as wrong. Still more replies. And More bullshit about the armed militias from other states.
This INBRED Mormo idiot with a family history of polygamy. Lets just calLLl this effer AL BUNDY and laugh. I need to just do that ….,.

You’ve got to be kidding me. WTF was the NAACP thinking. This man has been embroiled in two or three lawsuits over racial profiling, most notably on Elgin (Hang-time) Baylor, one of my personal favorites. *sigh*

In an article I read last week, astrophysicists said they were ‘surprised’ that a major urban area had not been devastated by an asteroid yet. Since 2001, there have been 26 asteroids that have impacted earth, each equivalent in destructive power to a nuclear bomb.